I Dream of Gini….

I’ve been teaching intro the last few semesters to try to get back in my teaching game in terms of the only thing that matters, teaching credit hours. But, I love teaching intro, it gets me back into the rest of the discipline. I’ve always been fascinated by inequality and have been following the surge since Ronnie Raygun put us on the road to serfdom. I always do a class where I pull up some graphs from Bill Domhoff and Lisa Keister and Emmanuel Saez to examine just how unequal the US (and the world) has become.

But, what really interested me is that given the extreme concentrations of wealth and income, how might one have an impact on Gini and how large would that be. If we confiscated all of the assets of the top 400 and redistributed them, what would our Gini be? We could even leave each of the worthless rich with a paltry $4 million to take care of their worthless asses until they die. What if we did this for all of the .1 percent? What would the gini be? Again, give them all a parachute most would call golden, let them keep a mansion, if they want….We don’t have to kill them, which is what they want to do to thousands of people who are going to lose insurance (or never got it….). The number of superwealthy people (say, over 700 million in assets) is so small that it is likely smaller than the number of people who will die within 6 months of Obamacare repeal.

I don’t know how they keep that Gini in a bottle…..Oh, wait, yes, I do….Jesus.